Bart Ehrman quote from an article- please help refute!

[adf417]

edward_george1:

Jesus Christ claimed, according to the evidence of the Gospels (again, assuming they are historical documents, and not talking about inspiration or anything like that), that he was God.

Nope. Only in John.

If we are speaking explicitly only then i would agree but thats the beauty of the scriptures, there are many different language usages in play.

Peace!!!

 

[PickyPicky]

Oh no, Father, not that piece of nonsense from Lewis again. Surely we all know that Lord, Liar and Lunatic are not the only possible ways people could view Jesus.

 

[PickyPicky]

We know that the early Church was puzzling over Christ — one result was Chalcedon; another was the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. Would it be surprising if the understanding of the gospel-writers developed?

 

[deMontfort]

Take those two things away and he is actually quite Catholic in his thinking.

Uh, no. The Catholic Church isn’t apostate and atheist in it’s thinking; Bart Ehrman is. Oh, and Catholic thinking does, in fact, believe God is active and tinkering.

 

[AdoroTeDevote]

Why refute this?
Because it’s absolutely heretical?!

 

[edward_george1]

First off, I’m not sure Lewis deserves to be dismissed so lightly.

Second, the Trilemma is not “nonsense,” nor did I (or Lewis) make the claim that those are the only possible ways that people could view Jesus. But if someone walks around claiming divinity for himself, those are the plausible ways within the cultural context. There are many other ways people could view Jesus, for sure, but based on claims of divinity, the scope is narrowed somewhat.

-Fr ACEGC

 

[BartholomewB]

Thank you, Father, for finding the time to post your comments here at CAF. They’re always informative, enlightening, and to the point.

 

[Erikaspirit16]

Catholic thinking does, in fact, believe God is active and tinkering.

Well, I was born Catholic and have been a life-long practicing Catholic. I think an active, tinkering God is nonsense. So do a lot of other Catholics. You are free to believe as you like of course, but please check your logic at the door.

Uh, no. The Catholic Church isn’t apostate and atheist in it’s thinking; Bart Ehrman is.

OK. Here’s a little quiz for you–and no cheating. No looking things up on the internet. Just from your very own memory and logic. Here are two quotations: one is Bart Ehrman, the other is the Catechism. Which is which? And can you see any essential difference between them?

1. “In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words.

In order to discover the sacred authors’ intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking, and narrating then current. ‘For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression.’”

1. “Their authors were human authors…they wrote in human languages and in human contexts; their books are recognizable as human books, written according to the rhetorical conventions of their historical period. They are human and historical, whatever else you may think about them, and to treat them differently is to mistreat them and to misunderstand them.”

These authors were anything but disinterested, and their biases need to be front and center in the critics’ minds when evaluating what they have to say. But at the same time, they were historical persons giving reports of things they had heard, using historically situated modes of rhetoric and presentation.”

 

[Erikaspirit16]

Ehrman looks like he is repeating Raymond Brown’s description of the Christologies of the gospels

Yes. If you know anything about Ehrman, you know he is constantly quoting and referring to Raymond Brown, a Catholic priest, author, and renowned Catholic expert on the Bible. He explicitly says over and over that Brown has had a great influence on him.

The business about the divinity of Jesus and exactly how all that works is something it took the Church about 500-600 years to work out so that what we believe today became the dominant orthodoxy. And of course all you have to do is look at the Jews, Muslims, and a lot of Protestant denominations, not to mention various Eastern churches, to see that the orthodox Catholic view is not held exclusively–even 2,000 years later.

 

[kainosktisis]

Not according to Brant Pitre in his book, The Case for Jesus, for which there is a YouTube video here:

There is some casual chit-chat in the first few minutes. The discussion starts at about 6:00.

He explains that some critics claim that since the Gospel of St. John was the later of the 4 Gospels that the Divinity of Christ is in question - like it was made up at a later time.

Brant states that all 4 of the Gospels have Jesus showing that He is in fact God - but in the earlier 3 Gospels, He does it in a uniquely Jewish way that His audience of that time would’ve understood based on the Scriptures.

 

[bobperk]

Thank God for newer Catholic Biblical scholars like Dr. Pitre and Dr. Bergsma, among others. Slowly but surely the modern skeptical scholarship of the Gospels will be swept into the dustbin of history where it belongs.

 

[HarryStotle]

Dovekin:

Ehrman looks like he is repeating Raymond Brown’s description of the Christologies of the gospels

Yes. If you know anything about Ehrman, you know he is constantly quoting and referring to Raymond Brown, a Catholic priest, author, and renowned Catholic expert on the Bible. He explicitly says over and over that Brown has had a great influence on him.

The business about the divinity of Jesus and exactly how all that works is something it took the Church about 500-600 years to work out so that what we believe today became the dominant orthodoxy. And of course all you have to do is look at the Jews, Muslims, and a lot of Protestant denominations, not to mention various Eastern churches, to see that the orthodox Catholic view is not held exclusively–even 2,000 years later.

No, actually, it didn’t take 500-600 years to work it out. It is in the Gospels, – all of them – it is in the Old Testament embedded in the Prophets and Wisdom literature, in the Psalms, and in other books. It is necessary to see the cumulative case to be made and how the words of Jesus and books of the New Testament bring out the relevant passages from the Old, but it is there.

It is also a predominant theme in the writings of the Church Fathers.

But mostly, it is in the words and acts of Jesus, himself, especially when he asks the question following some key event or other, “Who do you say I am?” He is God, riddling those around him.

Raymond Brown was writing when text criticism had done, arguably, its worst damage because it was a relatively novel approach and there was uncertainty in terms of how to answer the issues it raised, and that relying solely upon what could be shown from the text of Scripture alone. A great deal more work has been done since then.

Much of Fr. Brown’s work needs to be read as demonstrating what could be shown from the text itself, and not from the perspective of what he believed as a Catholic priest. So, you can’t claim what his work states or reflects his beliefs as a Catholic. It reflects only what he thought could be demonstrated using the tools of text criticism.

Ehrman’s claims aren’t as supportable as he (or you) think they are. He is trusted as a scholar largely because his books were widely used and he went unchallenged for a long time. That has changed in the past decade or so, and it will change much more in the next decade or two.

It might be true that the Church took several centuries up to the Council of Nicea to articulate how Jesus could be both God and man, both divine and human, but it is also true that the Church knew very early on that Jesus, the man, was God. Explaining how that could be possible to a Jewish and pagan audience was a different matter, however.

So don’t confuse the claim that Jesus was God with the working out of what that meant or how it was to be properly understood. The first was present from the get-go, the second required some time to unpack and articulate.

 

[HarryStotle]

These authors were anything but disinterested, and their biases need to be front and center in the critics’ minds when evaluating what they have to say. But at the same time, they were historical persons giving reports of things they had heard, using historically situated modes of rhetoric and presentation.”

Of course the authors were interested, they were willing to die for their beliefs. Being interested, even highly so, doesn’t make you biased, however.

Bias implies a blindness or incapacity to recognize the actual facts or truth of the situation because of some predisposition. Being “interested” doesn’t imply bias. In fact, it is possible to be so disinterested as to overlook key and relevant facts, such that your disinterest makes you lackadaisical in gleaning the complete story because you are more interested in other things or couldn’t care less.

Additionally, someone who is intensely interested in finding out the truth such that s/he leaves no stone unturned to come up with the real story is “anything but disinterested,” but that hardly makes them biased.

A witness to a murder where someone close to them was killed is hardly disinterested but that, in itself, hardly makes them biased. They may pursue the truth even in the face of opposition, but it may be the opposition who are the ones with the bias, because they may not want the full truth to come out. And someone who is disinterested may lack interest to the point of treating the case without sufficient concern to care if the truth comes out or not.

 

[bobperk]

Indeed, work such as Brown’s and Ehrman’s was all the rage over the last several decades. Unfortunately the great number of our current clergy went through seminary at a time when this one view of Scripture was predominantly taught and accepted. In due time, however, gone will be the days of homilies which refer to things such as “the Matthean community” or our Lord’s supposed “learning from the people,” and other laughable novelties.

 

[HarryStotle]

deMontfort:

Catholic thinking does, in fact, believe God is active and tinkering.

Well, I was born Catholic and have been a life-long practicing Catholic. I think an active, tinkering God is nonsense. So do a lot of other Catholics. You are free to believe as you like of course, but please check your logic at the door.

Belief in a non-active, non-tinkering God is called deism. Catholicism is not a deistic belief system, it is theistic.

You cannot read through the Old Testament without seeing God consistently acting in history. What do you call the plagues on Egypt?

For that matter, what do you call the virgin birth? That would appear to be God active and tinkering very intimately in the lives of human beings, to say nothing of the biological function and cellular genetics of one specific human being.

Yeah, logic. The problem is that logic is only as good as the premises you permit, and the biases you might unwittingly apply when selecting those premises.

If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent as Catholic theology – which implies theism and not deism – insists, then to assert that God doesn’t tinker or isn’t active is to place deistic restrictions upon a theistic God.

If you read the great Catholic philosophers and theologians, you will not find a God who crafted some mechanical universe that he wound up and left to its own devices to unwind itself free from all subsequent tinkering or meddling. Instead, you find a God who became a human being by “tinkering” in the reproductive cycle of a young virgin girl. That would seem, in any other context to be the very definition “tinkering” regardless of what a lot of Catholics might think or insist must be true to meet their logistical presumptions (or biases.)

 

[Dovekin]

Much of Fr. Brown’s work needs to be read as demonstrating what could be shown from the text itself, and not from the perspective of what he believed as a Catholic priest. So, you can’t claim what his work states or reflects his beliefs as a Catholic. It reflects only what he thought could be demonstrated using the tools of text criticism.

Brown’s deep faith is very visible in his writings, and I doubt many could read his writings without coming to a deeper, more mature faith. It is not the whole of his faith, that would take so many more pages and books to write the world could not contain it all. Your caution? timidity? Toward Brown is misplaced imo. He is a better guide to understanding scripture than anyone else I have read precisely because of his deep faith.

So don’t confuse the claim that Jesus was God with the working out of what that meant or how it was to be properly understood.

I think you are the only one confusing these things. I don’t see any sign of it in Erikaspirit16.

 

[Dovekin]

Brown expressed in insightful ways the Church’s perennial belief that the Bible is a book we read together. The scholars who criticize his works often fail to recognize that important part of his work. Fortunately Brown’s work will live on for many generations, keeping alive a faith in Scrpture in his readers.

 

[PickyPicky]

First off, I’m not sure Lewis deserves to be dismissed so lightly

Certainly I don’t dismiss Lewis: an interesting and intelligent man and scholar, and a fine writer.

Second, the Trilemma is not “nonsense,” nor did I (or Lewis) make the claim that those are the only possible ways that people could view Jesus.

I disagree, Father. It seems to me that is exactly what Lewis was saying: the trilemma is indeed concerned with restricting the choice to one of three, while there are other possible, and indeed plausible ways to describe Jesus. One of them, of course, as you know, rests on not accepting this condition of yours:

… if someone walks around claiming divinity for himself …

I don ‘t argue (here) for any of these possibilities. I do argue that Lewis’s Trilemma is a bit of a cheat, and unworthy of him.

 

[Benadam]

edward_george1:

Jesus Christ claimed, according to the evidence of the Gospels (again, assuming they are historical documents, and not talking about inspiration or anything like that), that he was God.

Nope. Only in John.

Among those in the know, would have heard that John said he was not fit to untie Jesus sandal strap. So this statement by Jesus would have caused confusion the answer of which is a revelation of Jesus’ divinity. In the following passage Jesus is revealing that He is not of the generation of Adam.

Matth, 11
11 Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

 

[Gorgias]

edward_george1:

… if someone walks around claiming divinity for himself …

I don ‘t argue (here) for any of these possibilities.

Pick up a copy of Pitre’s “The Case for Jesus.” You might be surprised at the ways that Christ referred to Himself as ‘divine’… even in the Synoptic Gospels!

I do argue that Lewis’s Trilemma is a bit of a cheat, and unworthy of him.

It’s a soundbite. It’s pithy, easily remembered, and expresses an important point. How is that “unworthy” – other than the fact that you happen to disagree with it?